< Paul opens 1 Corinthians 12 with something urgent: “Now about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.” He had watched what happened to a church full of spiritually gifted people who did not understand their gifts — comparison, pride, envy, disorder, and worst of all,...
The closing prayer of a Bible study does something the opening prayer cannot. The opening prayer prepares the room — it settles the people, invites the Holy Spirit, and asks God to open minds and hearts to what is about to happen. That is an important prayer. But the closing prayer does something different. It…
There is something almost impossible to put into words about the love you carry for your mother. It lives in small things — the sound of her voice, the way she showed up every time you needed her, the quiet sacrifices she made that she never once mentioned. And now you find yourself wanting to…
Someone you love is about to go into the operating room. Or perhaps it is you — lying in a hospital gown, the antiseptic smell of the ward in the air, the sounds of monitors and footsteps outside the curtain. Fear has a way of arriving very loudly in moments like these, and words can…
The Rosary is one of the most beloved devotional prayers in the Catholic faith — a contemplative journey through the life of Christ, offered with Mary as our guide. For centuries it has been prayed by saints and sinners, by soldiers and mothers, by children and the dying. Its power does not lie in complexity…
There are thirty-one chapters in the Book of Proverbs. Scattered across them are more than fifty individual references to the tongue, the mouth, speech, and words. No other subject in Proverbs receives this kind of sustained, concentrated attention. Not money. Not wisdom. Not even relationships. The wise men of ancient Israel were clearly convinced that…
Emotional wounds do not follow a schedule. They do not resolve proportionally to how long it has been or how hard you have tried or how sincere your faith is. They move slowly, sometimes invisibly, sometimes backward — and there are seasons when the most honest thing a person can say is: I am still…
There is a particular kind of tiredness that belongs specifically to women who are trying to be faithful. It is not the tiredness that comes from doing too much — though that is real too. It is the tiredness that comes from carrying other people’s needs so constantly and so naturally that your own have…
They are not the soft, androgynous figures of Renaissance paintings. They are not the plump, winged infants that appear on greeting cards every February. They carry no harps and no certificates of angelic achievement. And the earliest known Christian artwork — found in a Roman catacomb dating to the third century — shows them without…
You see him every Sunday at 10 AM. Standing tall behind the pulpit. Voice steady. Sermon prepped. The kind of man who seems to have it together in ways that make you feel like maybe you could too, if you just prayed more and read more and tried harder. What you don’t see is the…